Wake up

16072009

A clear, arresting and entertaining exposition of why we can’t afford to sit on our hands. Very nicely done, and im my professional opinion, very accurate. Some skeptics like Lindzen will scream that we’ve forgotten many negative feedbacks while exaggerating the positive ones. While they’re scrambling to find more imaginative negative feedbacks, we’ll have a few decades to watch videos, starting witth this little piece of art :

While the exact position of the tipping point mentioned isn’t known, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we will hit it sometime in the near future, and once we do it will be very hard -if not impossible – to come back to livable conditions for a very long time. My personal advice, however, is to take the “Freak Out ” part out of the equation, because fear has never helped anyone – but awareness does.

While I’m at it, here’s another another video that I think every skeptic should watch :

There a flaw in his decision matrix better explains the resistance to action. He treats identical results in column A as different which is a bit of a cheat: “Merely” economic ruin in row F gets a sad face but identical economic ruin in row T gets a neutral face because “everyone is OK with that because of we saved our cookies” but the qualifier “because we saved our cookies” doesn’t actually change the result and doesn’t belong in that box since that qualifying information is already present in the decision matrix in the adjacent box. So the actual decision (using his assumption of the worst possible outcomes in all cases) is between action with a guaranteed bad result versus inaction with the chance of either the best or worst outcomes.

Interestingly I remember seeing a nearly identical decision matrix used to argue for the iraq war back in 2003 where True/False rows were applied to the question of Iraq having or soon acquiring the bomb or not.